Monday, May 12, 2008

Here Mother's day was Sunday from last week (it's allways on the 1st sunday of May) and that weekend I was in Spain on a wedding so I couldn't spend the day with my Mom... She's used to not having me arround on important dates so that wasn't a big deal (as long as she gets her present!)
Anyway after seing all the post popping today about Mother's day I decided to make something for mine, and this way I could use my new star chocolate molds I had just bought! Great plan!
I tempered 1 bar of chocolate. The process of tempering is quite complex to explain here and there are quite a few manners of doing it. At school I was taught doing it on a marble top table and when I'm felling all "chefy" I do it this way in a little marble stone I got for this. Today it was not the case, I used the sedding method that is much less messy. It consists in melting part of the chocolate (about 2/3) and then adding the remaining chocolate until it reaches the right temperature. You can read about tempering chocolate here, here and here.

I toasted coconut and some pistachio nuts and added them to the tempered chocolate, for flavour and crunch.

"MY MOM IS A STAR" CHOCOLATES

100 gr (3.6 oz) tempered dark chocolate

5 tbsp toasted coconut

3 tbsp roasted chopped pistachio nuts

I toasted the coconut on a frying pan because it was a very small amount. You have to be careful doing this because coconut will burn fast and as soon as you're happy with the color take it out of the pan. I also toasted the pistachios on the frying pan, it's fast, just keep the pan moving around a bit.

Mix everything and put on the molds, it will grainy from the coconut, so it's best to use a small spoon to do the job. Tap the mold on the table to get rid of air bubbles inside of the molds. Let set and unmold.

If you don't want to temper you can still do them, just keep them in the fridge. Tempering or not doesn't affect the taste, so they're still gonna taste great. If you don't have molds you can just spread it and then break it into pieces.